Ablatives are materials that absorb heat and energy by transforming from one physical form to another. Typically, ablatives are used in a variety of aerospace applications. For example, most rockets have ablative coatings on surfaces that will be exposed to high temperature conditions during launch and during re-entry to the earth's atmosphere. The ablative material protects the rocket and critical hardware from high temperature by absorbing the heat. Typically, the ablative materials are applied to substrates/hardware by troweling. The troweling procedure consists of hand troweling the ablative material onto a metal substrate. Even distribution is obtained by seating the substrate within a frame and then applying and leveling the coating composition to the desired thickness. After cure at ambient temperature, the coating composition is removed from the frame. However, there are a variety of hardware surfaces containing protuberances to which hand troweling cannot be accomplished. Another method for applying ablatives is to bond sheets of ablative materials to a surface as pressure is applied under a vacuum bag. Vacuum bagging can be time consuming and is subject to bag leaks. Yet another method of application is the molding of ablatives to an independent mold of the protuberances, removal of the ablative shape from the mold, and subsequent bonding to the configured hardware surface. However, the production of molds is typically slow and labor intensive.
Accordingly, there has been a continual search in this field of art for methods of forming ablative materials into desired shapes.